“Tracing lines and telling stories. Biographic narrative research of migration experiences of women (Mexico-California)”
Qualitative research through narrative enquiry is used to narrate women’s experiences of migration from Mexico to California (US) started in the late 80s and 90s. Biographic narrative and graphic life-lines are used to problematize how these women narrate their life experiences in the transits between their place of origin and their place of reception.
In these stories, the depicted migratory process of five women is intertwined with other life-experiences that emerge as equally significant to them: marriage, maternity, forming a family. Beginning with a context of violence and poverty in Mexico, which makes them abandon their places of origin in search of a more dignified life, migration leads to new opportunities, enriched by a series of experiences that result in processes of empowerment and agency: paid work, studying, and community participation through the church
The biographic narratives and the graphic life-lines render subjectivity, gender, their imaginaries and the creative and artistic processes, interlacing images and words to integrate a resignified narrative of their experiences. These stories are analyzed using intersectional and feminist theory, as well as postcolonial studies, to insert them in a specific spatiotemporal context.
Finally, the stories are incorporated to a collective document, a comic book – where the visual and the written reproduce the forms of oral narrative–, to be able to count and recount ourselves the story.